Ronald Reagan campaign-stops in August 1980. Presidential candidate Jesse Jackson would visit in 1984, and President Clinton in 1997.

By Noël K. Wolfe

During the 1970s and 1980s, the Bronx was a national symbol of urban decay, used as a political backdrop to send messages of despair, governmental failure, the decline of urban spaces and other racialized messages of fear.[1] Drug addiction and drug selling became a national, state, and local political battleground that reflected differing political ideologies. Even at the community level, a tension existed within New York City neighborhoods about how best to respond to drug crises. In 1969, New York Black Panther Party member Michael “Cetewayo” Tabor warned Harlemites about the long-term implications of inviting police, who he described as “alien hostile troops,” into their community to address heroin addiction and drug-related crime. While Tabor did not deny that those addicted to heroin were committing “most of their robberies, burglaries and thefts in the Black community against Black people,” he challenged community members to be suspicious of the motives behind “placing more pigs in the ghetto.”[2] Tabor sought a community-driven solution to heroin addiction — one that did not include the police. Similarly in the Bronx, members of the Young Lords Party responded to heroin addiction by occupying the administrative offices of Lincoln Hospital in November 1970 and successfully demanding a drug treatment program for community members. The Lincoln Hospital Detox Program, a “community-worker controlled program,” paired political education with therapeutic support to assist those seeking help to overcome addiction.[3]

In 2001, Steven Malanga of the Manhattan Institute linked New York City’s improved economic fortunes with the elimination of crime and disorder.[1] This claim is still part of a standard narrative about New York shared by the mass media, the business sector, and many public policy makers. According to this narrative, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and his first police commissioner William J. Bratton (1994-1996) followed the prescriptions of the broken windows theory and ordered the police to go after disorderly people because their behavior, if unchecked, represented a gateway to serious crime. In the process, both minor incivilities and major crimes declined and this seemingly made the city even more desirable for affluent people and corporations. This narrative has prevailed mostly because of adept political entrepreneurship by conservative commentators, politicians, think tanks, social scientists, and public officials. The orderly city is represented as an unquestionable precondition for economic prosperity.

As a queer historian, a frustrating amount of my research comes from records of arrests. Sodomy, prostitution, disorderly conduct, masquerading, vagrancy, the crime against nature, solicitation – the list of laws that have been used in New York City to criminalize queer lives is long, varied, and stretches all the way back to 1634, when a Dutch colonial anti-sodomy law was used to prosecute a settler named Harmen van den Bogaert and an enslaved African man called Tobias.

I say frustrating because these arrests rarely say much to the historian interested in queer life: a name, a date, a charge; perhaps if you’re lucky you can find a newspaper squib that gives a line or two of context. Often, they are indicia in the truest sense, pointing towards something but not revealing much of anything (other than the existence of the state apparatus of criminalization). But in times where there was little public discussion of queer lives, records of arrests are some of the few regularly discoverable signposts pointing to where queerness may have existed.

Tong Wars: The Untold Story of Vice, Money, and Murder in New York's ChinatownBy Scott D. SeligmanViking Press (2016)​368 pages

Reviewed by Emily Brooks

In Tong Wars, Scott Seligman tracks the rise, internal functioning, and conflicts of New York City’s two main Chinese gangs, or tongs, from the 1880s to the 1930s. Seligman provides a thoroughly researched and tightly focused study of the On Leong and Hip Sing tongs that battled for control in the city’s Chinatown. He describes these groups as semi-underground fraternities that served social purposes, but whose primary functions involved running gambling parlors, and extracting payment from businesses operating in their respective territories. The violent clashes between the two groups receive particular attention in Seligman’s narrative. He mines newspaper articles, federal and state census records, court records, and Chinese exclusion era case files to track tong members through these conflicts with impressive detail. The author also uses these sources to show that the tongs formed a significant institutional presence in NYC’s Chinatown. The institutional landscape in Chinatown included regional and clan societies, as well as the tongs. These societies provided mutual aid and social connections within and across cities. Seligman’s exploration into the Tongs will prove of interest to readers curious about how Chinese immigrants, who were excluded from many elements of American society, formed their own institutions, and how these institutions then competed for dominance.

​From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime: The Making of Mass Incarceration in AmericaBy Elizabeth HintonIllustrated. 449 pp. Harvard University Press. $29.95.Reviewed by Michael R. Glass

When I was sixteen years old, a group of friends and I thought it would be fun to make “dry ice bombs,” a contraption where the pressure of the expanding gas pops a plastic bottle. It was, indeed, tons of fun, but when a neighbor heard the long bang, she thought it was a gunshot and called 911. After falling asleep on my friend’s couch, I woke up in the middle of the night to a police officer standing over me. “You’re under arrest,” he said.

Since 1964 the story of Kitty Genovese has shaped our expectations of community. It has served as a powerful cautionary tale, especially but not exclusively for women, at a time when new possibilities for independence and involvement drew many young people to big cities. Specifically, it was deployed to alert New Yorkers to a problem that did not exist: that of apathy. Activism was in the air and on the streets in 1964, and many New Yorkers joined local, national, and international organizing campaigns. Far from being apathetic, they gave their time and money as individuals to build groups and campaigns that could press their demands for reform and revolution. ​​The infamous phrase “I didn’t want to get involved” was quoted in a front-page New York Times report in March 1964 that blamed the killing of Kitty Genovese on more than three dozen people—thirty-eight witnesses to a heinous crime. Her neighbors were castigated for a failure of personal and collective responsibility. Almost immediately, the story of a young woman’s death became a warning of the growing “sickness” of apathy. The media promoted an epidemic of indifference at the precise moment when millions of Americans were organizing for social change. The myth that resulted is at the heart of the paradoxical story of Kitty Genovese.

On May 27th of 1904 the crackle of gunfire on W. 62nd St. in Manhattan jolted Sarah Lucas awake in the early morning. Dashing to the window she saw a white police officer shooting at a black man she recognized as John Patterson, the night watchman at a construction site across the street. As Patterson hid behind the construction shanty, the policeman continued to shoot, and intermittently “rap” his club against the sidewalk in a call for assistance. Lucas later testified in court: “In that time, I heard the voice of a woman, saying it is awful for that bastard…to kill John Patterson for nothing.” Then “I heard a missile fall in the street,” she reported, referring to a brick pitched at the officer from one of the buildings. According to Lucas, Patterson never emerged from behind the shanty. But the policeman came back to the sidewalk shortly, “looked all around” for the person throwing bricks, aimed up at her window and shot once more. “At that time, I was knocked senseless,” Lucas explained, and when she recovered consciousness she had wounds on her cheek, ear, and shoulder, blood pouring down her face onto her night skirt.

Today on Gotham, historian Mason B. Williams interviews Shannon King ​about his new book Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway? Community Politics and Grassroots Activism During the New Negro Era (New York University Press, 2015).

Few, if any, New York neighborhoods have been studied as intensively as Harlem, and no period in Harlem’s history has received as much attention as the Roaring Twenties. In his debut book, Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?, the historian Shannon King shows us a less familiar, yet more representative and perhaps ultimately more telling, side of interwar Harlem. In place of the tales of towering intellectuals, brilliant artists (and their canny boosters), and “the making of a ghetto,” King shines a light on the grassroots struggles — with police, landlords, and employers — which collectively “comprised the fulcrum of Harlem’s political culture” and paved the way for the remarkable upsurge of protest politics of the 1930s and 1940s. An associate professor of history at the College of Wooster, King is also a native New Yorker, raised in Harlem and the South Bronx. A Scholars-in-Residence fellowship from the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture allowed him to return to Harlem to conduct research for Whose Harlem Is This, Anyway?

Our conversation touched upon the usefulness of the concept of “community rights” in thinking about the Black freedom struggle in the interwar North; the role of gender in shaping grassroots activism; and King’s brilliant analysis of the effect of Prohibition on Harlem’s community politics. Ultimately, King says, he wanted to give the people who waged struggles for justice in 1920s Harlem the recognition they deserved. There is no question that he has done that. And in recasting those struggles as part of a campaign for community rights, he has filled in a crucial part of the history of Black politics, both in New York and beyond. — Mason Williams

Historian Mariah Adin’s new book tackles the story of Brooklyn’s so-called “thrill-kill gang,” a well-publicized case in 1954 involving four young Jewish Americans arrested and tried in relation to the deaths of two men in August of that year. After the trial, anti-comics crusaders used the case to attempt to outlaw violent comics in the state of New York. As someone who has studied the history of Jews and comics and New York City for years, this book sounded like a match made in heaven.

Chris McNickle, The Power of the Mayor: DavidDinkins, 1990-1993 (New Brunswick and London: Transaction Publishers, 2013).Review by Jerald Podair​There is an old saying that it is better to be lucky than good. David Dinkins, Mayor of the City of New York from 1990 to 1993 was, as Chris McNickle observes in his The Power of the Mayor, an extraordinarily unlucky leader. But was he a good one? Unfortunately, McNickle informs us, he was not. “David Dinkins failed as mayor,” reads the first sentence of this deeply researched, perceptive, and fair-minded study (xi). McNickle argues that while circumstances dealt David Dinkins a bad hand, he played it badly nonetheless. Elected as a racial healer and uniter, he left the city more fractious and divided than he found it.​